Homeward Bound: History, Imagination, and Memory in Afro-Atlantic Discourse

Drawing upon fieldwork from Senegambia, this paper analyzes interviews with African American tourists in Goree Island, Senegal and Juffureh Village in the Gambia to study the transformative effects of return migration on the African American psyche, and the restructuring of memory and identity within the Diaspora. The oral histories of African American tourists’ reactions about their visits to these sites of memory, and the impact they had on their conceptions of Africa, “Africans,” and the transatlantic slave trade are used to raise questions about the triangulation between memory, history, and imagination in Afro-Atlantic discourse. Combining anthropological and historical methodologies, this proposal analyzes the impact of tourismification, liminality, expatriation, and Afrocentrism in the imaginations of Afro-diasporic heritage tourists, and how these concepts inform the host community’s perception of the visitors and potentially alter the memories of their own heritage. In addition to the interviews, this project uses monuments as text, analyzing the Maison des Esclaves at Goree Island as a site of memory and imagined heritage, and Juffureh Village’s identification as the mythical home of Kunta Kinte, the supposed ancestor of African American novelist Alex Haley. The central question of the paper examines how certain events from both the early modern and post-colonial periods have led to the problems of African Americans’ identities in the twenty first century. Using historical data in combination with the author’s fieldwork, this paper interrogates and challenges historical and contemporary notions of Pan-Africanism, diasporic theory, the memorial landscape, and notions of race in the Atlantic World.